Small businesses more vulnerable to ransomware and here's what they can do

Businesses are under constant threat of malicious programs such as ransomware, that infect computers and encrypt critical corporate data. They present a serious problem, especially for SMBs and it is highly difficult to get rid of them.

According to Kaspersky Lab’s IT Security Risks 2016 survey, nearly 42% of SMBs fell victim to ransomware in the last 12 months. While 34% of these paid the ransom; One in five weren’t able to recover their data, even after the demands of cyber criminals were met.

Small and medium-sized companies often lack budget allocations for profound security expertise required to evaluate or compare dozens of security tools on the market. It is not that enterprises are not victims of these attacks, there has been a huge surge in ransomware attacks on businesses: almost six-fold growth (from 27 thousand in 2014-2015 to 158.6 thousand in 2015-2016).

Cryptomalware activity results in unrecoverable encryption of valuable business documents and forces businesses to pay a ransom to attackers to get their data back.

To address this problem and protect Windows-based endpoints, Kaspersky Lab has launched Anti-Ransomware Tool for business – a free software that offers complementary security to protect corporate users from ransomware. It combines two core technologies:

Kaspersky Security Network is a cloud-based service dedicated to processing depersonalized cyber security-related data streams from millions of voluntary participants all over the world.

While System Watcher is capable of a possibility to block and rollback harmful changes. It is an advanced proactive security technology that scans all important system events, including the creation and modification of operating system files and configurations, program execution and data exchange over the network.The free Anti-Ransomware Tool is compatible with the third-party protection solutions installed on PCs and can serve as second opinion software for the most advanced crypto-ransomware protection.